Stalk Options

The grueling endurance test of your given romantic comedy boils down to a keening Seinfeldian cry: Who are these people?! These smug sociopathic lotharios, these screeching anorexic maenads, these morbid entitlement complexes made gym-taut flesh, these tantrum-throwing, altar-abandoning, sex-withholding, humongous-apartment-owning freaks? And lovestruck gamines don't come any freakier than Amélie, so the sight of Audrey Tautou's dementedly enigmatic smile glaring out from a bed of roses at the start of a film called He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not bodes very ill indeed. Up to a point, Audrey's monomaniacal stalking of her cardiologist prey (Samuel Le Bihan) would be de rigueur in a studio heartwarmer, but then Laetitia Colombani's candy-colored stunt (co-written with Caroline Thivel) rewinds itself and starts over from a much cloudier angle. Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies, but that's enough to hold any rom-com casualty's grateful attention.